Re: [Groff] Tweaking font metrics

[Gunnar Ritter]

(Ted Harding) <address@hidden> wrote:

> In other words, 
>
>   .kp Font c1 d1 n1  c2 d2 n2 ...
>
> would extend the kern-pair table for font Font by the lines

I have introduced a ".kernpair" in Heirloom troff. It is
similar to your proposed groff request but also allows to
specify different fonts for the characters in a kerning
pair, i.e. the syntax is

  .kernpair font1 char1 font2 char2 distance

The added functionality is quite useful e.g. to solve the
problem of an italic "f" character that intersects with
roman parentheses surrounding it (and contrasting to any
half-solutions such as inserting "\/" or a motion command,
one does not have to write it every time the problem occurs
in the document text).

> zero length, then
>
>   .shc \[h0]
>
> would have the effect that the hyphen at the end of a hyphenated
> line would protrude be the full length of \[hy].

This proposal does not actually solve the problem of hanging
punctuation since e.g. an em dash should certainly also extend
beyond the right (or even the left) margin but should of course
retain its width when it appears between two words on a line.
Since you do not know in advance where the line breaks, you
cannot use a static width change here.

        Gunnar